Floatinghead's ramblings about music and music-related themes interspersed with various interludes and home of Cabeza de Vaca radio show on Scanner FM, Barcelona.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Life is like a broken record

More regular posts soon to cover the Störung Festival, once up on RA,
and this weekend past have been in Gijon in the
north of Spain
for the L.E.V. Festival.

Meanwhile, the last word about Albert Camus for the time being (I just
finished reading his notebooks). This time it is Jean-Paul Sartre speaking
about Camus that is interesting. After Camus’s death in January 1960, Sartre
wrote a tribute piece in English for The Reporter that has also been collected
in several places. Sartre writes:

“Every life that is cut off-even the life of so young a man - is at one
and the same time a phonograph record that is broken and a complete life. For
all those who loved him, there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we
shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work.”

The metaphor is a strange one, almost seeming to imply that a complete
disc of music is now broken and we must learn top play it despite the missing
pieces. But one senses he might also mean a record that was never fully
finished, leaving part of a symphony unfinished, unrecorded, with it. But is
this a broken record? Clearly Sartre also never imagined a world populated by
Marcus “Oval” Popp, Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone.